Today, we're going to go over a little bit about the Turbo-mist sprayers which are a line of orchard sprayers that we sell. They are made in Canada by a company called Slimline Manufacturing. This particular one is a 38 inch fan, I say fan it's actually a turbine style sprayer as opposed to your axial fan. It's a PTO driven and is not a self driven sprayer. It's a pull behind a standard orchard tractor. We can do a little walk around here and show you some of the components.
Right up front here is your pressure gauge and regulator that you can see from the tractor. Here is your control box that you actually have in the tractor to turn your left and right booms on and off and to adjust your pressure at your gauge as you're going along.
Move around, we have some of the components. This particular machine has electric valves for the booms. You can also get them in pneumatic and hydraulic applications as well, that would be these two here. This third valve is actually your pressure regulating valve for the overall pressure of the machine. Down in here we have a two-speed gearbox which is handy, because if you don't have such wide row spacing it's helpful to run on low fan to save fuel. If you need the extra oomph to get your material up and on the trees then you have that high fan option.
The pump is on the other side and when we go around we'll see that there.
This is your actual turbine housing. When I say turbine, it's a compressor, it's not an axial fan, meaning that it takes on twice as much air as it will put out. The air coming out is of a higher CFM and volume than you would get with a standard axial fan sprayer. It also lends to a nice balance out both sides being that it is a compressed form of air. When it comes to moving air with anything whether it'd be a Shop-Vac, a leaf blower, the CFM is more important by far than mile-per-hour the the amount of air you're moving and you really get that with this compressor style.
This is what's called an orchard head it's, basically, you have two sides they look similar either side, the air comes out there's a row of nozzles that you can adjust to a different amount of spray material as basically your lower nozzles would be of a lesser amount, because you're spraying the trunks. As you move to the top you need more material to penetrate out into the canopy of whatever you're spraying whether it be peaches, apples etcetera.
They have a really good program on the Turbo-mist website to tune these to pretty much down to the inch of your specific needs and your tree spacing and mile-per-hour of your tractor, the amount you want to put on per acre. There's a lot of variables that can really get that dialed in and make for a real precision application of your product so that you're not wasting money on lost product and material.
Both of these orchard heads they have a t-handle. You can tilt them out or up depending on the height of the canopy that you're spraying, new trees, young trees, basically. As we come around similar set up. Both booms do have a self-flushing valve on the bottom, which is a nice feature. It's a self-flushing valve-- it's a self flushing filter I should say that helps keep the breeze from clogging your nozzles and it's one of the nicer features of this machine.
As we come around, you can really see here's your two-speed gearbox, you have your low and high. Right now I have it in high. Low would be the opposite direction.
This is your [unintelligible 00:04:15] four piston pump. It is a piston pump as opposed to some other sprayers running centrifugal pump. The benefits being this pump can be run dry for a very short period, obviously, whereas a centrifugal pump, you don't want to run them dry ever, they'll burn up rather quickly. This pump will pull water without being underneath the level of the material in the tank, whereas a centrifugal pump, you need your water level above it to get started.
We've had really good luck with these pumps. Service intervals have been about two years and that's just for basic maintenance. They generally tend to last a good long time and they've been a good pump for us.
There's several options and combinations you can get on a Turbo-mist sprayer. These are some of the more basic ones like I think I said at the beginning, this is a 38P. This is the biggest fan that they actually make in an orchard sprayer. You can get all kinds of different greasing accessories, steps, different jack's, things of that nature. There really is pretty much, if you can dream it, they can put it on there for you. They're very good at custom building as well.
This is our Turbo-mist 38P sprayer. I'm going to show you guys what it looks like when we turn the booms on and show you a little bit about the pressure regulation from the box.
Here's both booms. You can see it really pushes the product up and into the canopy well. You can alternate as quickly as the flip of the switch when you change rows, just a switch from the cab of the tractor. Now, you have your gauge right here. As you're going along with both booms open, if you would need to make a fine adjustment to that gauge, you have that ability here, to change your pressure, to add more or less product. As you can see it blows it way up into the canopy.
That concludes a little brief overview of the Turbo-mist sprayers that we sell here at Messick's. If you have any more questions please feel free to give us a call at 800-222-3373 or visit us at messicks.com
One of the things you cannot miss about this machine is the profile of it. You can see as I stand here beside it, this is a much lower tractor that you typically would find in a 111 horsepower machine. You can also notice the huge set of tires that are on this machine here in the front and the back. These tractors are typically sold into two unique applications a one that is in the orchards where they need a load machine to get underneath the low branches and also into poultry and chicken houses where they're typically dealing with lower height rubes, they need a high horsepower machine that they can fit inside the barn.
